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How Uncle Eddie tried to 'do over' niece

Eoin Blackwell

Eddie Obeid's niece might have thought the disgraced former Labor kingmaker would have her back.

If so, she thought wrong.

At the launch of the book He Who Must Be Obeid at NSW parliament on Wednesday, former NSW Labor premier Nathan Rees read extracts about how Obeid intervened to try to stop his niece being elected mayor of a town in Lebanon.

The story brought laughter from the roughly 200 guests before they retired for drinks at Obeid's former parliamentary office.

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Mr Rees, who blamed his 2009 downfall from the top job on Obeid, said his former colleague had believed his niece's campaign to be racist and had flown to Lebanon where he found a unity ticket against his niece had collapsed.

"From the other side of the world, to a village, in order to do over his own niece," Mr Rees said.

"That's a measure of the instinctive attraction Eddie had to organising numbers."

But the launch was not light-hearted.

Mr Rees said the account of Obeid's dealings will make people angry.

Former NSW premier Morris Iemma said the book takes readers from Obeid's beginnings in Lebanon to the ICAC hearings that have exposed his corrupt ways.

"No more allegations, no more rumours or innuendo, but evidence," Mr Iemma said.

"Evidence of the good Christian family man, how he stabbed in the back members of his family very early on in his rise through the Lebanese community, other non-English speaking communities and the ALP."

Authors and Fairfax journalists Kate McClymont and Linton Besser won a Walkley award for investigative journalism for a piece on Obeid's dodgy dealings in 2012.

Six years earlier Obeid won $162,000 in a defamation suit against Fairfax over a front-page article by McClymont and journalist Anne Davies that said he sought a bribe over a western Sydney development.

Ms McClymont said Obeid had offered her a handsome sum a decade ago to write his official biography.

"I replied that I was honoured but I suggested to him that sitting at the table was a much better fiction writer in the form of (lawyer) Charles Waterstreet," she said.